avant-garde suburbia in the shadow of Senate House

On Sunday afternoon I went on a tour given by Owen Hatherley (who, I discovered, is neither nasty, brutal nor short, but instead rather lanky and very nice). It took us to the northern end of the Piccadilly Line, visiting the modernist stations commissioned by Frank Pick (a bit of a design hero here at Mondo Towers, as I've mentioned before), and designed by Charles Holden.

We met at Russell Square and made our way to Manor House to look at the expressionist ceiling in the ticket hall, and then on to Turnpike Lane and all points north to Cockfosters. It's easy to write these stations off as old-fashioned simply because of their age but, ironically, the surrounding suburban architecture is far more old-fashioned in style, even buildings designed less than a decade ago (in fact, especially buildings designed less than a decade ago). Throughout the tour of these otherwise unremarkable suburbs of Haringey and Enfield, we got a lot of curious looks from nonplussed passers-by: as one person on the tour suggested, it almost felt subversive because our attention and interest in the mundane intrigued people enough that they sometimes also stopped to look, and perhaps went off on their way with more awareness of what it was that surrounded them. Surprisingly, there was little attention from station staff, despite the size of our group, which meant that we thankfully avoided situations like this one.

In 1930, Frank Pick sent Charles Holden on an inspirational tour of Europe, and elements of what he saw on his travels have turned up in his station designs. The everyday use of his stations may have rendered them mundane, but if you look closely you will see that they are far from it, and when they were designed they were in fact considered pretty avant-garde. It's easy to pass by the elegance of the station at Piccadilly Circus (another Holden station), because it's such a busy station that it's often too crowded to pay attention to the detail, but at the far northern reaches of the Piccadilly Line on a grey Sunday afternoon it's quiet enough to be able to appreciate the work. And the work is fantastic, from the ironwork detailing at Wood Green, to the elegant brass uplighters and archway moulding at Arnos Grove, to the sweeping curves of Southgate and the European-style concrete of Cockfosters (a station I've mentioned before, and is now right up there on my list of my favourite stations, which includes more obvious places like Grand Central, so it's in good company).

At Southgate we stopped at the Wimpy for tea (or hot chocolate in my case) and food, because it was pretty much the only place that was open. While everyone else got nostalgic about the smells and the crockery, I found myself wondering if my father, who grew up in the area, had also spent Sunday afternoons drinking hot chocolate in a cafe there too, and subsequently felt a bit haunted by the ghosts of my ancestors. Sometimes the problem with living in London is that I can feel a bit crushed by the weight of my own history, because it's there at every turn (I know, last week I said it was one of the things I love about London; so what? I love it and I hate it both).

The Sunday emptiness at Oakwood felt like the start of a trashy B-movie, and the shops provided the perfect title: The Glowing of Zone 5.

After admiring Cockfosters station for quite some time, which included an unexpected bit of performance poetry by one of the other people on the tour, we jumped back on the tube. I was going to go home but was persuaded to go on to Piccadilly Circus with the remainder of the tour, where we stopped to admire the lovely old linear world clock (one of my favourite secret bits of London; even though it's not that much of a secret, no one seems to know about it) and then Owen took us on a mystery tour…

….of The Trocadero, of all places. There's an oddly disconcerting pocket of dead space in the corridor leading out of the tube station, which smells overwhelmingly of Cinnabon (not unlike the final panel of this comic strip)¹, and the eery quiet in no way prepares you for the sensory overload of the main area of the Troc itself. I hadn't been in there for a long long time and it was… insane, to say the least. We paid great attention to the sign warning us of the danger of being digitised into a distant universe beyond the fifth dimension, and hastened our exits to the safer environments of a pub in Soho, where we found utopia at the bottom of our beer glasses.

More pictures here, and have a look at Cheathco's pics here. For more information on the extent of Frank Pick's influence on Bloomsbury and beyond, take a look at In The Shadow Of Senate House, as Owen mentioned that he's hoping to do some more walks soon.